ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Over the last twenty years a number of strategies making use of synthetic oligo-nucleotides for modulation of gene expression have been developed. These approaches share a working hypothesis according to which nucleic acids are not considered as the recipient of genetic information. They rather constitute ligands designed to specifically bind to a pre-determined target, thus interfering with its function. This target molecule is generally an RNA sequence but can occasionally be a DNA region or even a protein playing a major role in gene expression through the selective binding to a promotor region.
